Bridging RFID Systems and Enterprise Applications through Virtualized Connectors

Despite the proliferating number of tools and techniques for building RFID applications, their integration with legacy enterprise applications (such as ERP and WMS systems) and corporate databases is still a very tedious task. Integration effort is therefore still a set‐back to rapid and cost‐effective RFID deployments in non‐trivial enterprise environments. In this paper, we introduce a middleware component (conveniently called “Connector”), which abstracts the interfacing of RFID systems with enterprise applications. Our Connector component considers RFID deployments that adopt the EPC Global architecture, i.e. deployments populating RFID events into repositories compliant with the EPC‐IS standards. Developers using the “connector” components are offered with handlers for the main interaction messages between EPC‐IS repositories and enterprise applications. The paper ends‐up presenting the implementation and use of the “Connector” middleware for the interfacing between a WMS system and an EPC‐IS repository in the scope of a logistics application. Lessons learnt from this validating case study are also outlined.